R.I.P. Oliver Sacks ~ Neurologist, Inspiration...

Sad to hear that cancer has taken Dr Oliver Sacks at age 82. Like so many others, I was inspired by his curiosity and engagement with patients -- and his capacity to tell their stories and the story of the human condition.  What came as a later surprise was his willingness to discuss his own demons, including a severe shyness, face blindness, and "staggering bouts of pharmacological experimentation" in his youth.

Hybrid Airships ~ Lockheed's Latest Lift Vehicle...

The Telegraph's Alan Tovey writes of renewed interest old idea...

"US defence group Lockheed Martin has developed a “hybrid” airship which does not need mooring towers or runways, enabling companies to operate more easily in remote areas. [...] The hybrids are “heavier than air” machines, meaning the helium they carry is not enough to lift the craft’s entire weight when loaded. The gas provides 80pc of the lift required, with the remainder being generated as the airship -- which is shaped like an aerofoil -- is driven forward by its propellers. The engines rotate so their thrust can be directed to give extra lift, meaning the hybrid airship can also take off vertically when not fully loaded."

This is fantastic for both the reasons Lockheed spells out in their video -- i.e. military, mining, construction, etc -- but also as an alternative form of ferry for crossing rivers, bays, and lakes, plus can provide new ways of moving people in cities! Here's how "hybrid" fits in...

Timelapse Shipbuild ~ Mitsubishi Fabs AIDAprima

Check out this timelapse shipbuild video by Max Moos from MK Timelapse GmbH of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries assembling the AIDAprima cruise liner!

Expert-Generalists ~ Broad & Deep Life Learners

Michael Simmons surveys Berkshire Hathaway's Charlie Munger's various qualities and finds him to be an Expert-Generalist like these others...

Tool Rack ~ Lessons from Mythb's Savage...

Popular Mechanics spotlights Adam Savage's rolling tool rack...

A Doctor's Sword ~ Amazing WWII Experience...

I'm looking forward to seeing the full documentary A Doctor's Sword telling Dr Aidan MacCarthy's WWII saga from Dunkirk to Nagasaki, a story full of disaster, compassion, resilience, and amazing luck. Here's the trailer...

Epic Selfie ~ NASA's Earth & Far Side of Moon!

NASA's EPIC camera on the DSCOVR satellite spots our Earth and the Far Side of the Moon!-)

Powering US ~ Electricity Generation Sources...

WashPo shares Map of how the US generates electricity...

LEGO Brickumentary ~ Sharing a True Toy Story!

A LEGO Brickumentary coming soon; trailer here!

The Counted ~ Total Victims of Police Force...

The Guardian shares interactive database -- The Counted -- of everyone killed by police in the US in 2015 (and counting). I've personally witnessed grotesque police brutality and -- like the rest of the 'Net -- have seen the seemingly endless number of videos of bullies with badges brutalizing citizenry.  And we're not talking about gangsters or terrorists, but everyday people. Here we can see the ridiculous scale of the wanton moral (and legal) corruption and inhumanity run amok. Who protects us from our so-called protectors?

Unicorn Hunters ~ Investors in Ventureland...

In her Bloomberg piece Goldman in Ventureland, Katrina Brooker writes of newly emergent players in later stage financings in so-called unicorns and more...

"Wall Street used to wait for startups to go public before investing in them. These days, however, entrepreneurs don’t need the public markets like they used to; private capital is plentiful. Uber has raised some $6 billion in equity and debt, and it hasn’t announced any plans to go public. “By the time you IPO as a company with a $60 billion market cap, you are really in the stratosphere,” [...] “The opportunity to invest has passed; the explosive growth is often behind them.” This market moves fast: When Airbnb raised money in April 2014, the company was valued at $10 billion; a year later, that valuation had more than doubled to $25 billion, when it raised another $1.5 billion. Included in the latest round were East Coast investors, most of whom would never have invested at such an early stage in the last tech boom..."

Word Frequency ~ Bubble-Plot of English Usage...

George Dvorsky at io9 spots frequency of English words...

Riding Light ~ An Inner Solar System Journey!

Andrew Liptak at io9 spots Alphonse Swinehart's Riding Light which takes us from Sun surface past the inner planets through Jupiter at the speed of light!

Age Reduction ~ Using VFX to Time Shift Her...

World Economy ~ Gross Global Product Visual...

BusinessInsider spotlights work by HowMuch.net on visualizing Gross Global Product...

Man on the Moon ~ Epic NASA Achievement!

CBS shares man's epic moonshot succeeding 46 years ago...

World of Languages ~ All Sizes Visualized!

African Infra ~ The Underdeveloped Continent...

Globaia shares via the Telegraph composite images of Earth showing impact and role of humans, here illustrating how Africa is the most underdeveloped -- and thus most promising -- Continent...

Pluto ~ NASA Shares New Horizons Imagery!

There's Pluto sez NASA APOD!

Cascadia Tsunami ~ Understanding Tectonic Risk

Kathryn Schulz writes in The New Yorker of The Really Big One...

"An earthquake will destroy a sizable portion of the coastal Northwest. The question is when. [...] At approximately nine o’ clock at night on January 26, 1700, a magnitude-9.0 earthquake struck the Pacific Northwest, causing sudden land subsidence, drowning coastal forests, and, out in the ocean, lifting up a wave half the length of a continent. It took roughly fifteen minutes for the Eastern half of that wave to strike the Northwest coast. It took ten hours for the other half to cross the ocean. [...] We now know that the Pacific Northwest has experienced forty-one subduction-zone earthquakes in the past ten thousand years. If you divide ten thousand by forty-one, you get two hundred and forty-three, which is Cascadia’s recurrence interval: the average amount of time that elapses between earthquakes. That timespan is dangerous both because it is too long -- long enough for us to unwittingly build an entire civilization on top of our continent’s worst fault line -- and because it is not long enough. Counting from the earthquake of 1700, we are now three hundred and fifteen years into a two-hundred-and-forty-three-year cycle."

Here's a simulation of what happened back in 1700... And here's a geologist's discussion... Finally, documentary shock & awe imagery... NYTimes' DotEarthling Andrew Revkin weighs in too, with nice infographic showing past 8.0 and 9.0 events over 10K years...